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Illustrating his point about the Lynchean Real, Zizek has elsewhere invoked the famous opening scene from Blue Velvet: the broad shots of idyllic small town Middle America with a father watering the lawn; suddenly, the father suffers a stroke or heart-attack while the camera dramatically zooms in on the grass with its bustling microscopic world of insects. "Lynch's entire ontology," Zizek writes, "is based upon the discordance between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the absolute proximity of the Real. His elementary procedure involves moving forward from the establishing shot of reality to a disturbing proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the crawling and glistening of indestructible life." Zizek notes how in Lynch's universe the Real eerily invades daily existence, with the camera's point of view often too close for comfort, with uncanny details sticking out, or close-ups of insects or decomposing bodies. One is reminded here of Dali's fascination with insects, going back to a childhood memory of finding a dead bird with ants crawling into it. Just as Dali relived this traumatic experience through his paintings and in his film with Bunuel, Un chien andalou, Lynch has also made paintings with similar subject matter, as well as sculpted heads, with real ants invading rotting meats and bird cadavers affixed to the artwork. Lynch's technique characteristically consists of juxtaposing two incompatible, mutually exclusive realms which he nevertheless allows to invade one another: the symbolic realm of representation (painting or sculpture) and the Real (the
decomposing meat and the ants teeming with life).
In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Zizek writes that "there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object-according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the
place of what he calls das Ding [the Thing], the impossible-real object of desire....It is its structural place-the fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity."
Lynch's Lost Highway invokes the Lacanian Sublime in the most enigmatic ways. In the essay published here, Zizek shows how the obstacle in the life of the protagonist is precisely of the order of a fantasmatic projection onto an impossible object of desire. About one-third into Lost Highway, the protagonist (Fred), who has been sentenced to death for the murder of his ostensibly unfaithful wife (Renee), inexplicably transforms into another person (Pete) in his prison cell. What follows is a bizarre shift from the dull, drab existence of the impotent husband and his brunette wife, to the exciting and dangerous life
of the younger, virile Pete who is seduced by the sexually aggressive femme fatale reincarnation of Renee, a blonde named Alice, played by the same actress (Patricia Arquette). This shift, Zizek argues, represents Fred's psychotic hallucination, after the slaughter of his wife, of himself as a virile lover-a fantasmatic scenario that ends up being more nightmarish than the first part of the film.